My first GPL contribution

One of the really nice things about open-source software is the source code is free for anyone to download and make changes to the code. Items licensed under the GPL (General Public License, one of the most popular licenses for open-source software) can be used for any purpose you want to use it for. The only stipulation is, if you make changes and then release the final product, you have to make your source code available.

Normally, I'm not much of a programmer. I did take some programming classes in college, but I only learned a language that is rarely used outside of the classroom. Anyone ever heard of Pascal? That is what I learned. And I didn't have a computer at the time, so I couldn't keep up with what I had learned, so I forgot most of it. Consequently, while I would love to contribute my own coding, I normally don't have the capability.

But I downloaded a brand new feature for my website. You will see it on the upper right corner of the site (at least, that is where it is as of this writing). It is a Daily Bible Reading applet that links to new passages every single day. It is designed to get through the entire Christian Bible (at least, the protestant version) in one year.

Unfortunately, the applet didn't work. But enough of my programming remained that, even though it was written using PHP instead of Pascal, I eventually recognized that there was a line that had been commented out that was never closed. Comments are added in by the programmer often to describe what the program is doing in human terms, but is ignored by the computer when the program is run. In short, the entire program was seen as one big comment, and the computer skipped over the whole thing.

I fixed that by looking at how other comments were ended, and ended that comment the same way (I still don't know PHP). I also made one change so that the links to the Bible passages open in a new window (or in a new tab, depending on what browser you are using and what your settings are). But that wasn't a PHP change, that was an HTML change, which I do know.

Now, it is possible that these changes are too minor to re-release, or that how I am using the code doesn't require me to re-release the changes. However, I am rather proud of my first GPL update, small though it may be, so I am hereby making my changed source code available. You can download the same source I use on my site after my alterations right here.

Non-geeks should probably stop reading now (assuming you are still reading this).

If you have Drupal, you can easily add this code to your site by creating a new block and copying this code into the block and enabling "PHP Code" in the "Input Format". It can also be used on any website that can handle PHP, but I'm not the one to tell you how to do that.